Paul & Elizabeth's

If you’re at all familiar with Northampton, chances are you know Paul and Elizabeth’s, a vegetarian and seafood mainstay in its thirty-first year named for owners and founders Paul and Elizabeth Sustick. The eatery is located in Thornes Market, an indie-style shopping mall in an old department store in the heart of Northampton’s Main Street shopping district. The mall has creaky floors and relatively narrow hallways (there are no engineer-designed paths of least resistance conceived to herd shoppers along the most lucrative route). Paul and Elizabeth’s isn’t exactly small, but it feels intimate despite lofty ceilings. Floor-to-top windows let in sunlight and a panoramic view of Old South Street broken here and there with panels of stained glass. Quilts and tapestries hang from the walls, along with nineteenth-century photographs of Native Americans. Almost every surface—floor, woodwork, walls, tabletops—is tinted a diffusely reflective honey. Waitstaff dress in casual gray aprons and black Oxford shirts.